![]() Charles Durning, though a second choice for the role of mailman, scoundrel, and implied pedophile, Otis P. His on-screen mother, played by Marlon Brando’s older sister Jocelyn, is a force, fiercely defending her son from a cruel smear campaign and calling out the foul skeletons in the darkness of her town. Larry Drake, generally cast as a villain, is only in the movie for about 15 minutes, but he manages to cull a generous bounty of sympathy in that time - enough to carry through the remaining 75 minutes. The film harnesses its derelict buildings and decaying soul into a viscous, potent, gloomy ambiance. Though the movie was shot in California, its characters and desolate stretches of farmland conjure dust bowl desperation in the fading summer. ![]() Viscerally, Dark Night is hampered by its small-screen genesis, but director Frank De Felitta and his cast and crew find other ways to keep the audience unsettled, a task made so much easier by Glenn Paxton’s supremely chilling score, the musical equivalent of drying leaves scratching against lonely fenceposts as they tumble in a fall breeze at dusk, of approaching the old, disused house on your street on Halloween night, as it’s getting later and the tricker or treaters are thinning. The story leverages this to amplify its eerie aura in lieu of gruesome kills and monsters. Feigelson isn’t particularly nuanced - the film is essentially a morality play the lessons to be learned aren’t buried in subtlety - it’s emotionally in tune in a way most horror or films made for TV are not. That may be somewhat disappointing at first, until the film’s other charms compensate. Despite being strongly implied by the title and marketing art, this is not a horror movie about a supernatural scarecrow out for blood. As the members of the mob start dying under weird circumstances, they fear a pissed-off spirit might be responsible. One of those is the made-for-television flick Dark Night of the Scarecrow, about a small-town disabled man (Larry Drake) who is killed by a mob that incorrectly suspects he’s murdered a child. Yet the amount of decent films based on our straw-stuffed field friends can be counted on one hand, probably. They’re so inherently unnerving, instinctively conjuring autumnal spookiness. There are maddeningly few horror movies that use scarecrows well. Starring: Larry Drake, Charles Durning, Tonya CroweĪvailable on: Blu-ray/DVD (VCI Entertainment)
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